Wisps
by onamoontrip
Summary: "Crowley wakes up and it's all a dream." - Mark Sheppard, Denvercon. Disjointed and abandoned partway through, but still wrapped up, more or less.


The morning is so silent that Crowley could hear a pin drop in the Winchester's hidey-hole hundreds of miles away. He turns to the mirror.

"Well, hello there," he says.

His cheekbones are hollow and bags run down his cheeks. He holds his left hand to his face. Each finger is thin and white, and they protrude from his palm like straggling tree branches. He taps his chin, expecting to feel the warm plump of his flesh, but instead he touches cold, saggy skin that barely conceals the jut of his skull at his chin.

He's never been a looker—God managed to deny him that much—but he's also never resembled a crack addict on their deathbed.

He looks down to see if everything else is in a similar order: saggy, pathetic, and generally incorrect.

He pauses.

Looks up. Looks down.

He's not hallucinating, is he? He twitches. Nothing changes.

Can't be.

His right hand is gone.

It's a dream, he tell himself at first. A dream. He hasn't dreamt since he was Fergus MaCleod, but that's completely irrelevant. No demon he has had the unfortunate chance to converse with has ever dreamt, but, again, irrelevant. Not that he's bothered to ask. His underlings are usually unsatisfactory conversationalists; "conversations" tend to consist of him imparting his wisdom and them quivering in some forgotten corner of Hell.

He's about to introduce his hand to his face in attempt to wake up when his own stupidity dawns upon him.

Not a dream. A curse. A witch's doing. Amara, his darling, megalomaniac girl, playing a game. Something of the sort. Nothing of his fault.

That resolution sits much better with him than him _dreaming_.

Crowley pulls himself off the bed with his whole arm, expecting his legs at the very least to support his weight. They collapse under him, the disloyal limbs.

"Bollocks," he says quite adequately. A sheet with a fluffy grey kitten print covers the mattress obscuring his vision, their innocent blue eyes gazing into his—anything but innocence there. He's torn between vomiting and lighting them on fire.

Fire. He tries to snap the fingers on his right hand. No sound comes. No fingers are there, he reminds himself, and tries to snap using his left hand. His middle finger slides over his thumb soundlessly, both fingers well lubricated with sweat. Fire does not occur.

He briefly contemplates inducing vomit, but the productivity of doing so is non-existent. Instead, he spends the next ten minutes feebly scaling the side of his bed.

Heat consumes his face and sweat coats his forehead, but he makes it back up. He glances back into the mirror.

The man in the mirror blinks when he blinks and taps his chin when he taps his chin. He mimics Crowley like a gimp puppet, lazily, never quite him, but never quite not-him. He recognizes his eyes, recognizes the pronounced curves of his ears, recognizes the laugh lines dropping down from his nose.

He tries to smirk. The man in the mirror smiles mopily instead.

He glares at the man, but the man can't even glare back properly. His eyebrows droop too low. His mouth sinks into his cheekbones.

"Pathetic," Crowley hisses. Tries to hiss. It comes out as more of a raspy groan.

He nearly punches the goddamn mirror in anger.

He checks under his pillow for a hex bag. Instead, he finds a satchel of lavender, a happy little thing embroidered with cherubs, harps, and all things too angelic and too positive. Crowley chucks the damn thing out of the window.

He's attached to this vessel, and for good reasons. There's a little scar on his leg from the first demon who tried to stab him with an angel blade, a long scar up his back from one of Dean Winchester's more frisky rage fits with The First Blade, and a peppered line of faint, yet still visible, scars across his collarbone where a Leviathan dug in its teeth before he shot it full of bleach.

He's also kept around the hickey Marilyn Monroe left on his hip.

Yet now the scars have shuffled themselves across his body, congregating on his arms and wrists. Once-blistered burns, long scarred over, dance across his legs. The hickey is gone.

Change isn't unusual. He experiences it each time he possesses the body of another fortunate soul. This time, he can't leave this body; it has no strength; it's a twisted, _human_ version of himself, and he can't do anything about it.

Therein lies the issue.

* * *

Acceptance is a funny thing. It takes years for some, and moments for others.

Crowley's always adhered more to the former. Simpletons abide by acceptance. Denial, he finds, much better suits demons.

Circumstances change, however, and so does Crowley.

Acceptance. This is not a dream, he reminds himself. This is reality. A reality induced by supernatural means, but still a reality. He still has control. He's Crowley. He always has control.

God, whomever and wherever he is, has also changed. His sense of humor only continues to become more sadistic with time.

* * *

Suddenly, it's too loud, and Crowley's thoughts aren't his own.

There's the persistent boom of artillery shells, the rat-a-tat of a machine gun, the hiss of fire, then the whisper of winter winds wheedling into streams of the Devil's silken words and the Winchester's shouts all soon again consumed by the boom of bombs miles off in the desert.

His thoughts are his own, but they aren't, and it's too loud, _too loud_.

He tries to cover his head, leave his bed, but his back cracks and his knees glue themselves together, and he thumps the stub that was once his right hand against his mattress. His bedsprings squeak as he thrashes.

Useless, useless, useless—

He screams— _it's too loud—_ and remembers.

A coma, two legs that dangle off the edge of a wheelchair, and a hand that _isn't there._

He was never invincible. He never ruled a different world. He was never a cocky, snarky arse that could pull off anything. In realization, his strength flees from his body like a soldier deserting in face of an insurmountable enemy, and his head falls into a slab of a pillow, his body trailing soon after.

He lays there limp, staring at the drywall of the ceiling so long that he forgets what the constellations look like, each star replaced with an ambiguous clump of cream splatters scattered in a sea of shadows.

This isn't _a_ reality, Crowley realizes, this _is_ reality, a reality he hardly recognizes anything of.

He wakes up, and it is all a dream.

* * *

His wife's name is Mary.

She's blonde and wears a red bathrobe around the house every morning, and she makes pancakes. She soaks them through with syrup and slathers on so much butter that Crowley can't understand why he's not dead from a heart attack, although his missing hand, paralyzed legs, and generally shitty respiratory system might kill him first.

Maybe her words, perpetually dipped in caramel and sprinkled with sugar, kind, soft, and pitying will.

His mind is stuck in an entanglement of lies spanning years. He sips on a glass of grape juice and he can't forget that he let human blood slide down his throat like red wine, burning all the way down. A picture of a little girl hangs on his fridge and he thinks of Amara. He tries to push himself from his wheel chair and strut over to his closet to don a suit when he forgets he cannot walk.

He doesn't recognize his bedroom, let alone where his shoes go or where he hangs his coat. Mary speaks of joy, their joy, the joy he's missed for three years, and he has no inkling of what that joy entails. She calls him James, and he can't stop glancing around the room to look for who she's calling to before he realizes that she's calling to him.

She's so happy he's woken up (finally, she says, tears clinging onto her eyelashes, finally), but he can't remember why he's woken up from or why he fell asleep.

It's all painfully unfamiliar.

The neighbors come over two days after he wakes up, which is perfectly fine aside from the fact that Crowley recognizes the wife.

She isn't Abaddon, Meg, Ruby, Bella Talbot. She isn't _"Winchester Tried-and-True"_ ; she isn't an all-powerful entity.

Crowley recognizes the way her hands wrap around her curves, the sway of her hips, the pucker of her lips, every little nuance of her body because _he_ wore _her_ to an orgy and then proceeded to kill all present and her husband. It was an amazing high at the time; now, he gags when he thinks about it.

Crowley doesn't meet her eyes as she smiles and discusses floral arrangements and block parties.

* * *

The psychiatrist's name is Abaddon.

She's an Asian woman with black hair that brushes the waistband of her slacks, not a single trace of red, but the nametag throws Crowley off every time he settles into the bed length recliner.

They don't speak of the 'big' things. There's a sign on the wall which lists them all out in her scraggly handwriting. They're the things Crowley's told her he doesn't want to talk about in their first session. He doesn't want to talk about his wife. His job. The war. And he doesn't want to talk about anything he doesn't remember, but he doesn't tell her that. He lets his tongue thrash in his mouth, and he stumbles over his words like an infant.

He tries to grasp onto his kingly eloquence. Yet the extravagant phrases and piercing remarks that tumbled out of his mouth like a waterfall of golden honey bleed from his mind. They aren't there. He's lost them.

"I'm lost," he tells her. It's their fifth session, and he notices that today her black hair's hiding the red pop of a pair of ruby studs.[M1]

"Why do you think you're lost?" Her voice is smooth.

"Everything's gone," he admits.

She glances at the chart. Points to number three on the list. No war. "You were at war. You've been in a coma. Perhaps you lost yourself then, and just haven't had the chance to find out where you are?"

"I was in the field, I think," he mutters. "Just doing my job."

"What was your job?"

Hell, he almost says, ruling Hell, but then Hell becomes something fantastical, something unreal, something that could never happen here. Guns, he almost says instead, firing guns, but then a tank squashes his thoughts and a plane engine buzzes in his ears. And then he stops trying to remember, because there's an unbearable burn at the base of his spine, and he reaches for his wheel with his right hand, but his stub just brushes against rubber. It tickles. He drags the stub against the rubber until it burns more than his back.

"I don't know," he admits. "Don't know what my job was."

"Have you lost anything else?"

"Don't know."

"What don't you know?"

"I don't know what I remember."

She scrawls in her notebook. Her hands are long and thin; her fingers present no rings. He glances back up at her ears and gazes at her red, protruding studs, advoiding her eyes as she turns back towards him. "What's the last thing you do?"

He drags his stub against the wheel of his chair once more. The burn boils up into his limbs like lava and something in his blood dribbles down to meet it. Anger. He hasn't felt that in months.

"Mr. Cleod? Would you like to talk about something else?"

The anger is stewing in his shoulders, his mouth, threatening to spurt out. "I'd like to end our session," he says.

"We still have ten minutes left." She clicks her pen, and it sounds like she's clicking her tongue, scolding him. He frowns.

"I'd like to—"

"Mr. Cleod, we're making progress." Her frown reminds him of Abaddon's, the real Abaddon's. Their perfectly powdered cheeks sink into their high cheekbones and their lips pucker and wrinkle. "Please, what do you remember?"

He stares at her, dumbfounded, as his anger simmers.

She blinks.

He finally snaps, and his words return fourfold.

"I know you may be slightly stupid," Crowley hisses, "But I believe that even a thoroughbred idiot can understand: I. Don't. Remember. I don't remember Mary. I hardly remember the war. I woke up today and had no idea what bloody year it was. I appreciate your attempts at thoroughly destroying any semblance of my sanity, but there's no reason to strain that vacuous mind to 'figure me out', darling.

I know where my _beautiful_ mind sits. I don't need a crackpot to inform me. We're ending this session."

His therapist's eyes are wide.

He fills his lungs with air, relishing in the room's cool reprieve before exhaling. His hot fury crashes back over him. He takes another breath. Lets it slide out. Clutches the wheel of his chair.

He weakly wheels out without another word.

* * *

They don't talk in the car, but when Crowley wheels into the house, Mary hangs back at the door.

"What's happened to you?" Her voice is breathless, and a thin pond of tears is collecting in the bags under her eyes. The letter lays open in her hands. "James?"

He doesn't answer.

The visit a house later that day. It's large, light blue, sprawls over a good number of acres. A little girl tumbles through the lawn, and she bounds over and hugs his leg.

"Her name is Joy," Mary whispers when he doesn't return with an affectionate gesture.

Joy has dim green eyes and scraggly dirty-blonde hair that brushes her shoulders. She's done up in a sequined red dress

( _didn't he give that one to Amara?)_

and a ragged teddy dangles from her arms. She looks at him with recognition and curls her head into her neck. He knows her. _He knows her, but from where?_

"Do you remember her?"

 _I do, I do,_ his body screams but her identity falls through the cracks in his mind like grains of sand. _I do_ , and he wants to hug her but he cements his arms and hand to his sides and his legs uselessly hang from the edge of his wheelchair like they always do. _I do, I do_ , but his mouth doesn't move and he can't.

"Daddy's still sick?" Joy whispers to his wife.

 _I am, I do_ , he replies, but the words congeal on his lips and refuse to spurt out.

Joy looks at him through her bangs and Crowley's heart plummets to the bottom of his stomach. He can't remember his own daughter and that near splits him in two.

Hellfire is an awful lot like the bombs, Crowley realizes as black shells and warplanes cloak the sky, all fire-like and destruction-esk. Evil. Deadly.

Killing is an awful lot like making a mutual deal—I miss, you hit me, you miss, I kill you, our bullets shake on it. It's all alright.

He knows more about war and deals than he does his family, and that—

That's the worst part.

It shouldn't be. He's a demon, King of Hell, Overlord of All Things Unholy, but that small, ever-so human part of him, the lingering bits of Fergus MacLeod, tell him that he should care. His family isn't expendable; little girls aren't intended for sacrifice; his wife won't run out on him. She's not a witch. Children are to be protected. Families don't fall apart.

He's not alone, Fergus reminds him.

It's too unfamiliar for comfort.

* * *

He can't sleep.

They pile pills onto his bedside and his wife dissolves Nyquil into his scotch but his eyes stay open because every time he closes them Lucifer jeers at him and Dean Winchester poses a knife over his heart. Their voices collapse as the steady march of bombs begins to thump in his dreamscape. He huddles under their silhouettes as they're outlined in splashes of fire and sand. Adrenaline floods his veins, but he can't run. Cockiness doesn't prevent him from scurrying away, nor the paralyzing fear. It's nothing but his damn legs and his missing hand.

They blame the insomnia on PTSD, flashbacks, the war, but Crowley slumps like a ragdoll in his chair and knows the difference.

* * *

Crowley meets Chuck Shurley on a visit to the psychiatric hospital. The prophet (except not, since prophets and angels and demons aren't real, remember, he reminds himself) is spread out on a bench outside the clinic, his jacket barely covering his shoulders and a half-eaten cup of noodles nestled in his hands. Mary's wheeling Crowley in through the front doors when he tells her to stop.

Mary standing shocked in the doorway, Crowley jerks his single hand along the wheel of the chair and rolls up to Chuck.

"Hello."

Chuck wakes with a start, flinging his grimy leather jacket to the ground. "Officer, I promise this is the last time. The cash is coming in tomorrow and—" He sees Crowley. "Oh."

"Oh," Crowley parrots.

"Who are you?"

Crowley levels a glare. It's still probably pathetic, he realizes. He hates pathetic, but it's what he has.

Chuck picks up his cup of noodles and raises it into the air. "Wait. I got this."

Hope flutters in Crowley's chest (and there's a phrase he doubted he would say) and his heart beats faster, faster, until he's sure it's going to burst right out and end up flailing on the ground. _Chuck knows—_

"James! You were at the high school reunion last year, right? Heard you went into, what was it again? Computer science?"

And it dawns on Crowley yet again that this world is different.

Without a word, he wheels himself back to the damn clinic entrance and lets Mary take him in, leaving Chuck to shiver in the park, alone, holy form branded by frostbitten patterns in the bench's metal.

* * *

The razor on the sink counter glimmers in the dingy bathroom lighting.

Crowley glances at it as he wheels out.

* * *

The new hand comes from a shop on fourth. The walls are white, the floors are white, and the desk Mary wheels him up to is white. The receptionist scribbles down his name—James, not Crowley, he reminds himself before speaking—with clinical precision and directs them to a cubicle-like room where a variety of mechanical hands hang from the wall. When the doctor strolls in, he allows her to tighten various bands around his arm and slide plastic hands over his stump like he's some child's dress-'em-up-Ken-doll. Crowley flexes what little muscle remains in his arms to force the mechanical fingers to whir about, griping onto the various tubes that the doctor instructs him to pick off the examination table.

One hand enclosed by skin-like latex knocks a tube off the table, and it clatters onto the ground. Mary and the doctor don't speak about it. The entire fitting, Mary fiddles with her cell phone. She hasn't talked to him since the diagnosis arrived unless it's to tell him about an appointment or Joy. He's missed so much, Mary tells him, Joy wasn't even born when you fell asleep. Mary never mentions a coma. She told Joy that daddy was like Sleeping Beauty; he'd wake up with a kiss from his princess.

Joy's staying at her grandparents while Crowley recovers. Her grandparents. _His parents_.

His mom's name is Violet, his dad's is Fergus, and if someone showed him their pictures he'd point to the wrong couple.

And he has a sister named Hannah. Singer in an opera. Voice like an angel.

These are the things that he doesn't consider, but rather pushes to the back of his mind and pretends that they don't exist.

Mary and Crowley leave the office without purchasing a hand because they can't justify any amount of mechanized motor mobility on the paycheck of a schoolteacher already floundering in medical bills even with the government's assistance. He hasn't had a job since the war, she reminds him, she's the only one making any sort of income and she's sorry, so sorry.

He looks down at his wrists and just nods.

* * *

Mary cries some nights. She calls her parents, asks about Joy, and Crowley, parked in his bed, tries not to listen, but the walls, thin as park bench planks, don't soundproof anything. He longs for _before_ , where he could celebrate his apathy. He longs for _before_ , when he could snap his fingers and oh, there'd be Joy! He longs for _before_ , before the war, when everything was so much simpler. He longer for _before_ , before he was a delusional maniac.

Mary sobs, Crowley longs for _before_ , and he stops remembering: _before what?_

* * *

His evaluation comes into the mail in a manila envelope, crisply stamped by the postage office, devoid of a personal touch. He's grown too accustomed to a bit of gut on the parchment, maybe a signature in blood, and he pinches himself with his good hand— _ha!_ —to remind himself that he's never received such a letter in his life.

Opening the letter, a flyer flutters to the floor, landing face down. His hand can't quite reach it to pick it up or flip it over, so he leaves it, rolling over it with his wheelchair on his way to the kitchen, letter in lap.

He reads the diagnosis. Final. Clinical. Each point is true. Nothing is misconstrued.

Leaving the letter on the kitchen table, he wheels to the living room, flicks on some droll telly with other people living their lives ion complete and utter misery, and pretends it doesn't hurt.

Crowley assumes that they used to share the room, the one he woke up in. There's a hook for Mary's bathrobe on the backside of the door, a picture of her on the nightstand, and a pair of her earrings dangling from an otherwise unadorned metal tree.

He sleeps alone now.

It should be a reason for celebration, a domain of his own carved out of a world of falsifications, but such a victory feels empty.

He doesn't know why.

* * *

The flyer finds a home on the fridge. Mary must have picked it up, Crowley concludes, and he continues to wheel by it every day, reciting the headline in his head like a death mantra. The Lebanon General Mental Ward, he thinks once, twice, thrice, then wheels by it and focuses on how dirty the sink's become instead.

Sometimes, Mary tries to brighten things up. She bounces into the kitchen, hair floating, prods and pokes him, attempting to goad him into conversation.

He doesn't reply often, and even then it's the simple things. Yes. Not. Of course, would you like me to— Sorry. Just tired.

They don't talk about the flyer.

Eventually it's too much. Someday just breaks it all down. Nothing special happens.

He prided himself in control, once. He wished he still could. He picks up the phone, Dials in the numbers from the flyer on the fridge.

"This is the Lebanon General Mental Ward. How can I help you?"

"I'd like to admit myself."

* * *

Mary doesn't say anything when Crowley ends up at the door with a suitcase. She just nestles her palms on the handles of his chair and wheels him out to the car, and she hums Hey Jude the entire way.

* * *

It isn't a barren cell, Crowley will give the ward that much. A hoarder's den, perhaps. Dreamcatchers dangle from the ceiling, a forest of craft feathers, plastic beads, glossy cord, and polished pebbles. Paints run down the frame of the window in rainbow waterfalls and a spray painted line of red contaminates the white of the floor, a brutal bleeding gash under a robe of colors. Enochian and Demon(ainian, if Crowley were to give it a name)[M7] scrawls across the floor in stretches of blue and red, and a stack of bibles teeter on the windowsill.

Otherwise, the room is boringly normal. A bunk bed with pencil holes drilled into its wooden frame is pressed against the left wall. A set of hooks are screwed behind the door, and a set of lab coats and ties are thrown over the back of an armchair.

And for some reason, Castiel is his roommate.

Of course, Castiel's name is Emmanuel and he's a spiritual healer disillusioned that the trees are out to get him, but that's okay. He still has those dopey blue eyes and that gravelly voice, the same black hair, the same proclivity to snatch a tan lab coat on the way out of his room and wear it. Crowley falls asleep to Castiel's hippy murmurs and hums, and he wakes to his brilliant blue eyes from across the room.[M8]

Castiel is still Castiel, albeit unhinged.

* * *

He doesn't tell the doctors about the visions.

"Flashbacks. Bombs," he confirms. "I don't remember much, but I do remember some."

But not the flames of hell lurking in the corners of the room, creeping along the doctor's lab coat and singing his calves.

Maybe those aren't real too.

Maybe they were never real.

* * *

Kate Milligan is the sassiest psychiatrist Crowley's ever had the misfortune of meeting.

Her first impression of him, dictated for the entirety of the lunchroom:

"My son talks more than you, you Brit, and he's a med student at Stanford."

A hand flicked over her shoulder, quickly followed by:

"Chances are that half of your symptoms are faked for the drugs. You don't need my assistance, you need a therapist."

And what's the difference?

Crowley doubts her certification, but he's the crazy one who sleeps in a vandalized room, and she's the lab coat-wearing professional. He's not one to judge.

Chuck Shurley admits himself to the Lebanon General Metal Ward on July 13th, 2015. Friday the thirteenth, to be exact.

Kate is very enthusiastic to share about her new little project in a sort of twisted therapist show-and-tell. Similar diagnosis in, she presents a paper, these areas. Crowley nods and gives her the satisfaction of no sincere credit.

Gabriel Novak is the janitor.

Gabriel, the porno mustache creeping along his upper lip like a pipe cleaner, collar propped up by a pair of paperclips like a lean-to, and grease stained chucks, is the janitor.

"Excuse me," he says as he blunders down the hall with his mop. "Comin' on through."

Crowley hoists himself onto the arm of his wheelchair with a huff and stares through the window of his door.

Interesting.

* * *

The bathroom isn't haunted, Crowley reassures himself, the lights flicker because the building's older than Crowley himself. It has cold spots because the heating is shit and wet feet and shuffling patients have worn down the floor tiles worn down to creamy grout.

Then he sees the ghost.

Her pale hair hangs in front of her eyes in silken curtains; her fingernails are filed to a sharp point. Her bloodstained fur coat drags behind her as she slides towards him, hands reaching out for his throat.

There's two stages to Crowley's "Oh Shit" reaction. It's an abrupt jerk like Dean's, mixed with the Castiel's stoniness and just a hint of Sam's infamous bitchface, not that Crowley would attribute anything of it to anything Winchester-related. He rips—rips—a spoke from his chair and slashes at the Bloody-Mary wannabe. She dissipates with a screech and Crowley books it out of the restroom, wheelchair crooked and hand unwashed and gashed by the shattered spoke.

Hell. He's turned into a bleeding Winchester.

They blame it on a negative reaction to the meds, but Crowley has given enough fake diagnosis in his time to know that they think he has regressed. A gashed hand. Suicidal proclivities. He can connect the dots.

But there's Gabriel's a janitor, Chuck's a nutcase, the Winchesters, perpetual Heroes of the Bloody Day, are figments of imagination, Crowley's stuck in a bleeding wheelchair, and there is—he swears there is—a ghost in the men's restroom.

A female ghost.

Murderous Mary?

It doesn't really fit, but it's a work in progress, just like the case.

He's forgotten how much he misses the adrenaline. The unmistakable thralls of control, of power. He remembers how it was _before_ , before waking up, and he can't stop the edges of his mouth from twitching.

* * *

"Something is not right," Catiels says as Crowley wheels into their room. "You have been hurt."

"You don't say."

"I do. Perhaps I could interest you in a massage?"

Crowley glances at his wheelchair, Castiel, then the wheelchair again. The spoke is still ripped out, and the armrests are dented. Yes, as if he's going to haul himself out of this chair, lay on his bed, and let Castiel, amnesiac angel supreme, give him a massage. He doesn't respond.

Rejected, Castiel settles into his bed and the celebratory hum of The Presidents of the United States of America's _We're not Going to Make it_ bounces through the air.

* * *

"I want to change your prescription." Kate Milligan controls Crowley's fall down to the therapy chair. "Well, I really don't want to, but what the Institution says is what the institution makes happen, you know? I've got bills to pay, and not enough hours in a day to pay them."

Mary (the ghost, not his wife, although his wife could very well be a ghost and he couldn't find it in himself to care one way or another) drifts across Crowley's thoughts as he initials beneath his wife's signature. Of the few records Crowley has the chance to inspect, there's no mention of a woman dead in the men's restroom of a psychiatric hospital, nor have any of the other patients caught a glimpse of her. They've noticed the general off-ness, the cold spots and the… unpleasant, spine-tingling feeling of someone gazing at their dicks as they take a piss, but not the ghost.

It's always something explainable and mundane, something dismissible and absurdly commonplace.

"Bloody bitch," he mutters.

Kate stops mid-sentence. "Come again?"

"Nothing."

She blinks once, twice, and resumes her speech about responsibility of the patients, corruption of the overhead, and general disconnect between her and her son, because he's gotten involved in the wrong crowds, smoking marijuana and claiming that his best friend is a werewolf, but that's okay because his druggie brothers have the supposed werewolf medicated.

Crowley's eyebrow quirks up.

Huh.

* * *

For whatever reason, Chuck chronicles the daily lives of the patients at the Lebanon General Metal Ward on a 1950's typewriter and pastes the pages, archaic font and red ballpoint pen edits, on the bulletin board of the rec room. Once the board is full, Chuck conquers the front desk, the far wall of the mess hall, the door of the janitor's closet, the floor of the psychiatric ward.

Gabriel dutifully mops away the papers every night, only for them to spring back up the next day.

Chuck's in for insomnia, although the healthcare providers say that he's already been treated and no, they won't pay for him to go through the medical wringer again, and it shows. His back is a crescent due to the persistence and weight of his words, and black bags hang beneath his eyes like drooping willow branches. His waist is as thin as a sheet of paper and his ribs frown from underneath his shirt. He exhaustedly wanders from wall to wall in the hallway, his arms and legs unable to support him for more than two seconds.

And yet somehow, despite his food, sleep, life deprived body, he manages to pound out hundreds of pages and coat the ward with stories.

One evening, Chuck bumps against Crowley's wheelchair. Crowley feels the back of seat with his hand. There, flapping in some invisible breeze, is a paper.

"The King's Consort," it reads. "In which a former Irishman hunts a ghostly apparition."

If Crowley could, he'd stand up, pat the man on the back, hand him a shot glass of scotch, and make a deal to alleviate Chuck's pain, but Crowley can't even begin to move his legs.

Lunch, if one could call it that, comes promptly at eleven AM with the sharp bark of a lunch lady and the piercing shriek of a whistle. The stench of rotten meat emanates from the kitchen, the slop in the food vats sloshes from side to side like diarrhea falling into a toilet bowl, and droopy fries drape over the formless soup of ketchup on Crowley's plate like crosses on coffins.

Maybe this is Purgatory, and he's serving time for his innumerable sins against humanity. Perhaps this is Hell, he thinks, and the Demons got it all wrong. He got it all wrong. Hell isn't endless queues; it's the slow torture of helplessly watching those beefy apes piling a plate with rubbage before sliding it under the counter like a drug dealer to the unfortunate recipient.

But he isn't the King of Hell anymore, just a crippled has-been with a ghost problem. Maybe. Hope's a silly thing, Crowley knows, but it's a helluva rush.

He pokes at his meal before electing to only spare his potatoes, beaten to a pulp by the lunch ladies' meaty fists, from suffering the cruel fate of the rancid trashcan.

* * *

Mail comes in on Saturdays.

It's October, and Crowley gets his first letter. It's written on looping "l"s and hearted "i"s. The bottom corner is yellowed with coffee stains, and the flap is held close with a gold stamp, embossed with a Christmas-tree topper angel.

"From Joy."

He runs his thumbnail along the seal, popping it, before working the letter out and letting the envelope fall to the floor.

" _Daddy_ ," it reads. " _I hope you're getting better. I'm in school now and I miss your lunches. I you're your sandwiches but Mumma says that you make really good Bento Boxes. I don't know what Bento Boxes are but I want to try one. Get better soon, your lovely little Joy."_

He doesn't know Joy, he realizes, doesn't recognize the handwriting, doesn't understand how to make a kid's lunch, doesn't grasp the Bento Boxes. That isn't him. He's the King of bloody Hell, not some softie, nine to five father with a penchant for Japanese recipes. Joy isn't his daughter.

 _Joy was never his daughter._

Crowley rumples the letter in his hand and drops it. The paper ball plummets to the floor of his room and hits with a click, rolling along the carpet floor before it settles at the rim of his bed.

Castiel—Emmanuel—breaks from his meditation to stare at Crowley. "Avoidance isn't an option when family is important to you."

Crowley stares back. Family advice from the resident shut-in? Yes, that was helping his sanity in leaps and bounds. "Thank you, oh wise one. Mind telling me how to fix it?"

Castiel nods. "You are welcome."

Crowley's second question goes ignored. He huffs.

(It's fine. Joy isn't his, Crowley reminds himself. She's Mary's daughter. Not his. Never his.)

Crowley runs over the paper ball in spite with his wheelchair when he prepares for bed.

* * *

Crowley distracts himself. _The King's Consort_ is a horrific read; Crowley will give Chuck the satisfaction of knowing his work is, if sometimes incoherent, other times peppered with psychotic ramblings, gory.

The tiles of the bathroom are not stained by blood, there isn't an eyeball stuck to the bottom of the sink (Crowley checked, with a mirror, a pencil, his stray wheelchair spoke, and great difficulty), and there isn't a body nailed to the ceiling.

If one writes about prophetic visions, one does not utterly fuck up any validity of said visions through unnecessary embellishments if one can avoid it.

It simply isn't done.

The short story has a smattering of merits. The ghost's name is Betty, not Mary, and she and her husband overdosed on cocaine in a public restroom in Chicago. A gay man from Britain had just landed in Lebanon and, with his pants quite literally half down, discovered their seizing bodies stashed behind a stall door and called the police. She died in the ambulance; the paramedics managed to save her husband's life. He was moved to the Lebanon General Metal Ward for further suicide prevention, but insisted on chopping off a lock of her hair off of her dead body and sticking it a locket. Said locket was lost in the men's restroom, Betty began to freak out any Brits who dare to disturb her remains, and they all lived happily ever after. Well, he was insane, and she was a ghost who had issues with men about to take a piss, but happier than most stories Crowley's read of late. Upon consideration, it isn't saying an awful lot.

"Belligerent Betty," Crowley mutters to himself. "I'm not even bleeding British."

* * *

"I saw the letter?"

"Hm?"

"Plausible deniability and all of that, but I saw the letter. From Joy, right?"

"Part of the psychiatry degree, isn't it? Do you go digging through everyone's trash?"

"Just yours."

"Brutally honest, as always."

"Someone around here needs to be."

"Katie, not everyone needs the chicky-poo heart-to-hearts. I'm fine."

"If you say so."

* * *

"I love your ass."

"They've hopped me up on all sorts of meds. You look absolutely wonderful right now."

"Our recipe for love: A cup of you, a cup of me, stir well, bake for two hours, and serve hot. You wanna bake?"

"Oh, that frustrated hair-run thing? Absolutely sensual."

"Did you just fall from Heaven—"

Bali's a shitty, but obnoxiously persistent, flirt. Male, female, transgender, heterosexual, homosexual, asexual—everyone's free game. He's some sort of Scottish-Swedish mutt, with blonde hair, blue eyes, and a noticeable glow of health. Crowley's not completely sure why Bali's in, but rumor has it that he has delusions about angels talking to him in his sleep, and he almost committed suicide because the angels told him that he was an apish traitor. He also has a strange fascination with ghosts and the resident haunters at the Lebanon General Metal Ward.

But oh Go— Sata— power that may be, the _flirting_. It's barely tolerable, and there has to be somewhere Crowley draws the line.

"I'm not an angel." He glares at Bali. "And stop drooling on my hash browns."

"So is that an invitation to drool all over your-"

"No."

"Playing hard to get?"

"No."

Bali's face drops from flirtatious to dead serious. "So you don't want to hear what I got to say about Betty?"

Betty was a topic of interest, yes. Crowley slides his food tray to the side. He wasn't going to each lunch anyways; it stunk worse than the sulfur reeking from a dead demon vessel. "How about you tell me and we'll see."

"Betty's husband died in the woman's restroom. I want to go explore, but the administration doesn't like it. Genders, you know? Never understood them."

"He died in there?"

"Yeah, still haunts it today. Cue the infiltration of the woman's restroom."

"You do understand that I'm in a wheelchair."

"Wheelchair, schmeel chair. And look, you've only got one good hand. That's all it's going to take."

Crowley sighs, leans over the table's edge, and taps his fingers against its glossy plastic surface. He's gone from Crossroads King, to King of Hell, to Overthrown Dictator, to Crippled Human.

"And you plan to do this when?"

Why not add All-American Pervert to that list as well.

"I need to come with you," Chuck grovels at the wheels of Crowley's wheelchair. "I need inspiration."

"How did you—"

Chuck looks at him with hollow, haunted eyes. His lips are stretched taut under his nose, cracking, dehydrated. "God told me."

"Of course he did."

They sit—Crowley sits and Chuck kneels—until a nurse walks by and holds out one pedicured hand to Chuck. The prophet looks up, tearing himself away from Crowley, and Crowley seizes the chance to wheel past Chuck as fast as he can, abandoning the prophet to the nurse.

Perhaps he's having a relapse.

He legitimately believes that Chuck is a prophet, Gabriel is some sort of amnesic angel, and his roommate's name is really Castiel.

It was just a dream, he reminds himself. It's just a dream, but then Bali pops his head into Crowley's room and asks if they're still on and if he could pretty please, with a cherry on top, ask the janitor about the key, that'd be great. Thanks.

If Crowley's going insane, he finds that he really doesn't care.

* * *

Gabriel's rounds take place at noon and at midnight; every twelve hours, routine, just like clockwork. He whirls his key ring around his middle finger as he saunters down the hallway, whistling eighties rock. The head of his mop bangs against the floor, tassels flopping like the hair of a punk-rock, head banging teenager.

Castiel has his legs crossed on his cot, deep in meditation, when Crowley pops the door open and wheels out into the hallway.

"Why hello there." Gabriel says. "The resident recluse makes his appearance. Even Chuck comes out more than you do."

"I need to sneak into the women's restroom."

"Isn't Balthazar trying to do that right now? God, please do not tell me he recruited you. I don't think I can handle it anymore."

"Balthazar?" As far as Crowley knows, the alcoholic angel isn't anywhere on the premise. Last he checked, some two hundred odd years ago, Balthazar was living out his dream as in the vessel Caribbean prince. There wasn't any dark skinned dimwits—

"I think he goes by Bali or something."

Oh.

Yeah, that made sense. A frightening amount of sense.

"I've encountered him. He's very… outgoing."

Gabriel visibly relaxed. "Just promise me you don't get caught up in any of his harebrained schemes, okay? It might seem promising but trust me; he's up to no good. You still want the keys?"

Too late for that.

"I'd love them, if you wouldn't mind."

Gabriel shrugs and tosses the keys onto Crowley's lap. "Don't know what you want them for then; don't really care. Just don't get caught. The administration will have your hide. Not pleasant. I should know."

"And I'm sure they nailed you for holding mile high parties on the rooftop after hours. Is there supposedly some in the women's restroom as well?"

"The weed was good while it lasted. I repeat, don't get caught, and you'll be fine." Gabriel gives short bow, abrupt and sarcastic, before turning around the corner. The dismissal lasts a short minute before Gabriel peeks back out. "But if you find some, you know, I wouldn't mind it. Bros before admin hoes, right?"

"You got 'em?" Bali hollers from across the hallway.

Chuck's hanging onto the keys and the back of Crowley's chair for dear life as Crowley careens down the hallway, hand almost burning with the heat of friction against his wheels. Left wheel, right wheel, left, keep straight.

"Does it look like it, you bleeding idiot?"

A dam breaks somewhere deep in Crowley and adrenaline rushes through his bloodstream, like there's a helium IV pumping into him that continuously lifts him higher and higher until he's going to pop. His heart pounds against his chest and he cannot remember the last time he felt so _alive_ , like he has two hands and two functional legs and he can go wherever, do whatever. He is whole, and it is wonderful.

"Looks like—Chuck, don't you dare drop those." Bali nearly rams into the corner of the wall as he turns.

They fly by Kate Milligan, as still as a granite statue in the doorframe to her psychiatry room, nearly run over Gabriel doing his rounds, and finally coast to a stop in front of the girl's restroom.

The door opens with a click, and Bali and Chuck rush in. Crowley, restricted by the width of his chair, bumps around the white doorframe until he slips through it into the restroom.

The interior is washed white by years of bleach; the tiles are bone-white, the ceiling is powered white, the doors to the bathroom stall are white, and the sinks are white. To top it off, the paper towel dispensers are a set of two, wonderfully white tins filled to the brim with light napkins. Every bloody thing is white, and quite frankly, Crowley's sick and tired of it, which is perfectly fair.

"No ghosts so far," Bali says as he peeks into a stall.

"Or women." Chuck leans in from behind Bali. "Absolutely no women."

"This might have been a fluke."

"This _was_ a fluke."

"Shut up ladies, you're both pretty," Crowley interjects, earning a flat glare from both Chuck and Bali. "Are we hunting all the ghosts and ghoulies, or what?"

"Yes mum," Bali chirrups.

A smirk spreads across Crowley's face. It's good to be back in the game.

* * *

"Behavior issues, from all three of you. I expected better," Kat Milligan hisses. They line up in front of her, Crowley slouched in his wheelchair, Chuck supporting himself on Bali's shoulder, and Bali thrown over the back of a chair. "But then again, I never really expected much."

Bali winked at her. "You know you love us."

Milligan squeezes the bridge of her nose between her forefinger and her thumb. "Just get out of my office."

"Of course."

As Crowley, Chuck, and Balthazar respectively wheel, stumble, and strut out, Crowley is tempted to laugh. Team Crowley: One ex-King of Hell, an insomniac with millions of words to his name, and a flirtatious angel, all stuck in a mental ward, with the aforementioned King of Hell battling delusions of… something.

Here, he is alive. Here he is, alive. So far from his family, but so much closer to himself, and he _loves_ it.

Bali's annoyed the usual crew in the corner of the lunchroom enough to scare them away from the four seats near the window. Crowley wheels up to the end of the table, Bali plops himself down in the middle of the three chairs on one side of the table, and Chuck takes the lone chair on the other side. It's not even, it's not perfect, but it's them. They look like a cliché of societal rejects huddling around a table. It's worthy of a plaque, really.

The two chairs next to Bali sit unopened until Bali plops his foot down on top of the hard red plastic and takes up all three seats.

* * *

"Expand outside of your social group. Try something new," Milligan lectures them as they meander down to the common hall. "With you three, it's the best therapy I can provide."

Bali's pushing Crowley's chair and flicking at his hair; Chuck's shuddering off to the side. The institution took him off depression meds a week ago, and the poor guy is still suffering from withdrawals. His arms are as thin as twigs and he _couldn't stand still_.

Not that it was overly annoying, but Crowley kept catching Chuck out of the corner of his eye and It was reaching the point where it was difficult to concentrate.

Chuck stumbled over his own feet and narrowly avoided having some one-on-one time with the polished tile floor by grabbing onto the wheel of Crowley's chair.

It wasn't as if anything could be done about it, Crowley supposed.

An angel, a prophet, and a demon walk into the common room.

It's the beginning of a bad joke, and Crowley isn't sure if he should be breaking down in hysterics or banging his head against the wall.

The angel is talking up the room supervisor, one Kate Milligan, the prophet is curled up in a ball in the corner with Casti— _Emmanuel_ —stroking his back in reassurance, and the demon is exchanging looks with the janitor, who's, predictably, deciding to drag Lysol wipes across the bookshelves while their session occurs.

 _So,_ Gabriel looks, _you found what you're looking for?_

 _There wasn't any drugs, so I can't say I did._

 _Cute._

 _We were looking for a ghost; we didn't find the ghost. Simple as that._

 _You're all happy-go-lucky with the resident slut; I'd say you were getting something on, not ghost-hunting._

 _I'm in a wheelchair, and he's not a slut. Just sexually active. Maybe we're lovers in league against the administration, but not touchy-feely chaps with a death wish._

 _So no drugs._

 _No, no drugs._

At least that was Crowley's general interpretation of Gabriel's multitude of pleading, grudging, and accusing glares, with an eye bat thrown somewhere in the middle. Perhaps there was a lustful _something_ in there too, but Crowley is more so ready to fall asleep in his wheelchair than write an instruction manual on the intricacies of angel-demon look conversation. Perhaps it'd help in future negotiations.

It was something to consider when he returned to his former glory as King, rather than remaining as he was, in a wheelchair, with only one hand.

 _Returning._ Crowley furrowed his brow. _That's unlikely to ever happen._

 _Excuse me? You told me to what?_

 _I told you to go and shove a broom handle up your rear. You've got plenty._

 _Oh, I hate the lunch food too. It's horrible. You ever try drinking soda with that horse slop? Don't. It all ends up coming right back up._

Crowley might not be as well versed in Look as he so believed.

He's about to leave the group session when Gabriel taps him on the shoulder. Gabriel's dirty blonde hair has escaped from behind his ears and hangs in a curtain over his eyes, covering his face in a dark shadow, and the stench of lemons hangs around him in a thick, suffocating cloud.

"Is Balthazar giving you two any trouble?"

Crowley chuckles. It's a cultured chuckle, of course, bordering a sarcastic cough more than an actual laugh, he tells himself. "Not at all. You concerned he's going to steal me away?"

Gabriel's smile is flat. "I heard he and you were caught in the women's restroom."

"A misunderstanding."

"Sure."

"Sure."

Gabriel huffs and pats Crowley's head as if he's placating a dog. Crowley doges away from Gabriel's large hands with a frown, and Crowley's stub knocks against the side of his wheelchair in protest of his movement. "Just don't get into shit, okay?"

"Is this how you hit on people?"

Gabriel groans and leaves with a glare.

* * *

Hisses in the hallway startle Crowley out of sleep.

"You need to stop this, Balthazar. It's getting out of hand."

"What's getting out of hand?"

"You. Dancing around with an army vet and… Chuck for your amusement."

"We're better now."

"You're dragging them around hunting a ghost. Milligan's already given you shit. You're just going to hurt them; you need to stop this."

"I need to stop this? You were the one who told Mikey that Emmy needed help. You were the one who ran off when it came time to pay the bills. You're the one who got a job in the mental ward in Bumfuck, Nowhere. You— _you—_ were, no, are the one who screws up."

"I was doing what I thought was best. I am doing what I think is best."

"What you thought was best? Oh, excuse me, you're the third oldest and raised me as a newborn because Dad had more issues then all of us combined, because you knew how to handle a kid, and then you run off an abandon us all, just because the senior's taking drugs and you want to join him. You don't get to say that."

"Oh, don't get me started on the drugs."

"I'll get started on any drug I want."

"Oh, like you haven't already. I couldn't imagine how else you'd fuck up your life so royally."

"Fuck you."

"That's all you got?"

"You want a slap on the rear too? Since we're obviously not siblings, not-incest is a go."

"Aw, I'd love it. Slap it hard."

"So you want a go, do you?"

There's the clatter of a broom on the floor. "I've been waiting too long to have a _go_. Bring it on."

Emmanuel flips over in the bunk above Crowley as the dull thud of fists and flesh haunt the halls like distorted ghosts.

Grenades tumble along the walls as the enemy parades across the floor, neat, filed, and uniformed in cameo, parading across bleached grout lines. Dogs nip at his ankles and he can run, but sand dunes loom in front of him at every turn like skyscrapers, preventing his escape. His hand, the one that isn't there but it is, grapples with a jammed gun clip before the bomb hits and it isn't there again, but wasn't it there a moment ago? It's just buried in the sand, that's it, the sand's warm like bathwater and he just can't feel it. It's there, never mind the blood and the carnage. His legs refuse to rotate around so he can flop over and give his hand an once-over.

It isn't there. His hand isn't there.

Oh god, why isn't it there?

It's the first time in months the flashbacks hit, and Crowley doubts his hold on reality.

Emmanuel isn't humming when Crowley wakes up. He's swathed in sheets, a mole buried deep into its burrow, hiding away.

"I just want to go home," he mumbles. "I don't want to do this anymore. I don't want them to fight. Fighting's silly stupid. You know the bees? They don't fight. They just get along and do what God intended them to do." A pause. "I wish God told me what to do. Would make life an awful lot easier, you know?"

Crowley just lays still in his bed. Emmanuel doesn't hum, the ghost flits from Crowley's mind, and no one talks anymore.

They don't even think.

* * *

Bali, eye black as charcoal, sits at their table with Chuck.

"I wrote about it," Chuck whispers over a platter of soggy potatoes. "He told me and I wrote it."

Crowley stabs the mashed concoction on his plate with a stray bean.

 _He_. Who was he, to allow the janitor to beat up a patient in a metal ward? Who was he, to take Crowley's life away from him? Who was he, to leave them frothing like diseased rats, gnawing at the seams of reality's curtains until they ripped and the dull stage was revealed?

 _Who was he? Who was he?_

 _Who?_

The potato pile slops over the side of Crowley's bowl as he turns from the table. The wheels of his chair squeak against stained tile. "You're crazy," he mutters as he wheels away from Bali and Chuck. "We're all crazy."

He ignores the small part of him that screams "he" is God.

* * *

"You hit him."

Gabriel's lazily moping the hallway. Drops of blood still stain the wall, but Chuck's papers cover the worst of it. "So?"

"You hit your brother."

"So?"

Crowley gathers himself in his wheelchair, all four feet of boiling rage compressed into a single bullet. "So why don't you bloody care? He's yours. He's something. Emmanuel's something. But you can't bring yourself to love them, now can you? No. It's all you. You and your bloody careless mop. Good luck with that."

Slowly, Gabriel looks up from the floor. His eyes are dull, void of their usual mischievous spark. "And why would you care?"

"You have a family. You have people to fall back on. People don't get that an awful lot. In the words of a good friend, avoidance isn't an option when family is important to you." He hasn't got any family important to him, but perhaps it's different for Gabriel. Crowley's had a witch for a mother, a bozo for a son, a distant airhead for a wife, an unfamiliar doll for a daughter. He's had lackeys, Winchesters, angels, demons, but no _family_.

That just isn't something he gets. It isn't even something he deserves, he realizes, and that makes it all the more precious.

"Family's shit anyways."

Gabriel resumes mopping the floor, eyes down, as if the conversation never happened. Bali comes to mind, dejected in his corner of the table, as Chuck mutters plot holes and story line and _this is what it's come to_.

Crowley's lived this long in a mental ward, almost fought a ghost, lived with bloody angels, and he's stuck dealing with Gabriel's daddy-family issues.

Crowley explodes. "You don't understand, you hairless ape. No, you've just been assigned to shine the bleeding floors and mop up my diarrhea from the floor. Not to actually care. Care. We all want to be loved, don't you get it? We all want to be loved."

 _I just want to be loved_. A tear streaming down his face as human blood surges through his veins, but this is neither the time nor place.

The mop falls to the floor and knocks over the pair of water with a clang. Gabriel stands in the rapidly growing puddle like a child.

"Emmanuel's in my room. Bali's hidden himself away in the restrooms," Crowley says as he glares at Gabriel. "Clean up your own messes for once instead of somebody else's."

Emmanuel isn't in their room, and that's okay. Anger still simmers beneath the surface of Crowley's skin in streams of boiling blood, and he could do with some time alone.

He's parked at the foot of his bed and has his hand grasped around the arm of his wheelchair. He hoists himself up.

His hand slips.

His legs shoot out from underneath him as if they are on ice skates, and Crowley falls hard on his ass on the polished tile floor. The foot of his chair runs up his back, cleanly shaving off a long strip of skin along his spine, leaving the raw flesh beneath stinging in the open air. His nub lands with a thud and pain flares up along his arm, his forearm pounding, pounding as his bones ache like they're filled with cavities and the dentist's just gone in with the drill. His feet are skewed at off angles, a bit too far forward, a bit too angled to the left, but he still can't feel him.

He can't feel anything,

The anger drains out of him immediately and he just lets his arms dangle lifelessly by his sides. He's hunched over, with his back burning like someone rubbed salt back there into an open wound. It hurts.

There he is, helpless on the floor, doing exactly jack shit. Bali's nursing his beaten ass in from distant corner of the hospital, Chuck's still crazy, Emmanuel's missing in action, and who in the entirety of Heaven and Hell could care what Gabriel's up to anymore.

The King of Hell doesn't cry, but, as tears carve canyons into his cheeks, Crowley considers that perhaps he's not the King of Hell anymore.

Kate Milligan doesn't say a word when she finds Crowley in his room. She simply rolls back his chair, catches him as he topples over, lifts him onto his bed, and throws a blanket over his limp form.

As she walks out of the room, he lays limp on the bed, unmoving.

 _What is he doing anymore?_

* * *

"He's not here." Gabriel rushes into the room, mop tassels flopping from side to side. "Crowley, _he's not anywhere_."

"I thought you were a bleeding machine who didn't need family."

"Crowley, shut up for a minute and listen. Emmanuel's flown the coop. He's gone."

A thin, orange crust, similar to a brittle sheet of butterscotch, glues Crowley's shirt to his back. It cracks like glass as he rolls over, dusting the bedspread with flakes of amber.

Gabriel's eyes are dull. They're always dull, Crowley realizes, just now they're just not as quite as hidden behind filth and grease smears. "I need your help."[M36]

"Now you need my help. Thought to ask Bali?" Crowley's flat words bite at Gabriel, accusatory, vehement, and the vigor and panic bleeds out of Gabriel.

"He's drunk, and I'd rather not draw the attention of the authorities."

"Chuck?"

Gabriel shrugs, and his arms wave by his sides like limp ropes. He's slouched over, back curved, legs lifeless. Not quite defeated as Crowley's own self, but pretty damn close. "Med center. Seizure."

"So you're asking the cripple," Crowley says. He rolls back over. "Shove off."

The handle of Gabriel's mop drags across the floor as he slides it to the wall, and the screech of wet wood against ceramic pierces Crowley's ears. "Please."

"I didn't know you begged."

"I don't."

"You were."

"I just need to fix this."

Because Crowley's the King of helping people, fixing things. Because he's not a ragdoll.

He can't even get his shit together to deal with his family, a ghost, let alone another man's family issues.

" _Please."_

Crowley lets his head flop over as to face Gabriel. The angel—if Crowley could even call him that; he'd been a shit angel no matter how God spun it—had let himself fall against the wall, smearing Emmanuel's— _Castiel's_ —pastel demon traps into a red splotch, a bloodstain upon cream porcelain. He's slowly sliding downwards like the wall's porcelain tiles are the only thing keeping him from collapsing into a corpse, and even that safety net's failing.

Crowley's never seen Gabriel so helpless.

"I just—I just need them," Gabriel mumbles. His voice is barely audible. "I need them, and I need to stop fucking up. It's like this every time, and I don't want to just stop trying. They're family, and I've already lost enough of that for a lifetime."

"But family's shit?"

"I didn't mean it."

Crowley's gaze is blank. His anger has bled out of him and into his sheets; the pain of the scab on the back have faded into a dull throb. "We've all said things we don't mean. Doesn't mean that we don't deal with the consequences."

(He's such a hypocrite and he hates himself for it.)

"I know. I'm sorry."

"You shouldn't be apologizing to me."

Gabriel huffs, presumably angrily, but it comes out broken, high pitched, somewhere between borderline withheld sob and frustrated whine. " _I know_."

Crowley meets Gabriel's gaze. Still defeated, still dead, but the faintest glimmers of hope—or maybe those are tears—lurk in the corner of Gabriel's eyes.

Shit.

Beth, Becky, whatever her name was, Joy, Mary—they fade in memory as Crowley balls his fists resolutely and rises from his bed. His back cracks, his stub hurts, and his head aches, but the pain fades. He forces a smirk onto his face. It doesn't reach his eyes (nor his cheeks, nor eyes the edges of his lips, instead just ghosts along his Cupid's Bow), but Gabriel still responds with the faintest of snorts. Faint, but still there.

"I suppose we've got an angel to find."

Gabriel doesn't remark on the angel comment as he loads Crowley into the wheelchair, but Crowley still notes the surprise that dances across Gabriel's brows. Perhaps it's just a reaction to Crowley's help, but the King of All Things Disabled still interprets it as something more.

The hope, the adrenaline, the _something_.

Crowley's ready for an anything of something more.

They find Emmanuel on the roof, Gabriel huffing and Crowley near laughter.

"I heard you're hunting a ghost."

"Yes."

"Feels right?"

"Yes."

"Fuck, Emmanuel, I'm sorry. I screwed up. Forgive me?"

"No one ever understands, brother. They think they are doing it for the better but they always mess up. We allow our ambitions to precede what God has planned for us." Emmanuel's smile was sad, and his eyes were half-closed as if his eyelids had simply given up. "But I forgive you as God has forgiven us all."

"Is that a yes?"

Emmanuel gives him a smile, stretched and pained, but a smile nonetheless, and Crowley can see fragments of Castiel peeking through and he has _hope_ , _hope_ like he's never felt, not as Fergus, not as James, not as himself.

"Yes," Emmanuel says, and for the first time, Crowley _smiles_.


End file.
